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Do you struggle with muddy watercolors? Do you want to get brighter mixes? Understanding color bias was a major step towards solving these issues for me. As a self taught watercolor artist, I spend a ton of time on blogs and YouTube. There is so! Much! Info! on any topic you can imagine on the internet. I spent a ton of time researching watercolor supplies after the free class I took at the library. I'm such a nerd--and I secretly hoped if I researched enough and bought the exactly right supplies I would have an edge over every other beginner. Silly right?...

I'm renting gallery space with Kansas City Design Collective, located in the Kansas City Crossroads!  I'm displaying & selling handmade, original watercolor cards and paintings, and a few sets of card prints. All of the art at KCDC is exclusive--I don't have these works listed anywhere else at the moment. Stop by the gallery to check it out, participate in one of the events, or purchase one of the works via the KCDC website!

"Alla prima" is a term I just discovered last week. It means "at first attempt" or "all in one go" and I just love this idea! It describes my favorite way to paint and it makes it sound so much more legitimate. "Hello, I'm Jen Roberts and I paint alla prima."  It just sounds fancy that way! Wikipedia also tells me the French version of this is "au premier coup" which I like quite a bit too (possibly due to my years spent studying French in college!). Painting alla prima just fits my impatient nature. I don't want to fiddle...

Are you familiar with the saying "the ever receding goal of perfection"? I think about this concept a lot because I have a tendency to only see what I need to improve on!I have to remind myself to stop at regular intervals to look back and see my progress. I've been doing some of that in the last few weeks. I think because I cut back on my studio time some at the beginning of the month, I had more time to just sit with and review my work. I had been working consistently for many months before this, and...

I recently discovered a new artist who I'm slightly obsessed with: Gwenn Seemel. She has an incredibly distinctive style and huge backlog of blog posts for me to catch up on. I was recently going through a series of her 17 tips for loving your own art, and thinking about how to apply them to my own work.Many of the items on her list are opposites, such as suggestions 1 & 2: find other artists' work that you consider boring, and learn to appreciate other artists' work. So lately I've been trying to think really critically about my reaction to...